“Why did she save me? Why not Hogue?”
“That’s something you’ll have to ask Ramona.”
“I can’t find her, either. I’ve been calling and calling but there’s no answer. You don’t have her address, do you?”
“She lives in the South Valley. Two hundred Sunset Court. Turn west off of Isleta. It’s near the end of the block.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Have you talked to Sheila McGraw yet?”
“Oh, yeah, she called me. I’m a prime arson suspect, aren’t I? I’ve been mouthing off about the Forest Service. I was on the mountain. I was carrying fusees on my pack. I know how to use them.”
“She does believe it was a professional job.”
“I made an appointment to see her.”
“Are you taking your lawyer?”
“What do I need a lawyer for? I’m telling the truth.”
“Sheila wants to talk to Ramona, too. From her point of view we’re all suspects: you, me, the Barkers, Ramona. The means and opportunity were available to all of us, separately or together.” Although motive was a lot trickier.
“Hasn’t the Forest Service caused the Barkers enough pain?”
“They’ve established that the fire was started by fusees. You carried them. Eric carried them. Since Ramona had a fire shelter, they’re going to assume she was carrying a fully loaded pack and that she had them, too.”
Mike looked into his glass and rattled the ice with the straw. “So she was carrying a pack. What was the motive? Ramona has a strong attachment to trees. She sees her job as saving them, not killing them.”
“Revenge. The Forest Service was responsible for the death of someone you both loved. Hogue did threaten to fire you both.”
“You didn’t tell McGraw that, did you?”
“No,” I admitted. “She didn’t ask me what transpired on the mountain. I didn’t see it as my role to volunteer.” It’s seldom a lawyer’s role to volunteer.
“Really?” Mike asked.
“Really.”
“Hogue couldn’t fire me anyway; I’d already quit. If Ramona was worried about her job, the smart thing would have been to save Hogue’s life, wouldn’t it? Even the worst woman-hating racist wouldn’t fire the Indian woman who’d saved his life.”
“Maybe she couldn’t find Hogue. The smoke was very thick.” Or maybe she did find him. No one knew if he died before or during the fire. “Did you see anybody else on the mountain or any other vehicles on the road that day?”
“No, but you know how thick the brush and trees were. There could have been people all over the mountain that I didn’t see. There are plenty of people around with a gripe against the Forest Service.”
“Did you tell anybody else that you were meeting Hogue on Thunder Mountain?”
“No, but anybody could have seen and heard the helicopter flying in and known the Forest Service was around. A house went up in smoke, didn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Anyone looking for motive ought to be talking to the owner.” He put his glass down on the table. “I proved my point about Joni, didn’t I?”
“You proved to me that she wouldn’t have survived the fire even if she had dropped her pack, if that’s what you mean.”
“Joni was a first-class firefighter. It pissed me off that she wasn’t getting any recognition for that. So what if she didn’t always go by the book? The best firefighters don’t. How are you going to advise the Barkers about the suit?”
“I told them that I think there’s cause for action. The government was negligent in a lot of areas. But whether the Barkers will choose to go ahead, I don’t know. What do you think?”
“For myself I don’t care anymore. I proved what I wanted to prove. But if it would make the Barkers feel better, I say go for it.” He stood up; in his mind the conversation was over. “I need to get back to my workout. You can believe it or not, Neil, but I’m glad you survived.”
“I believe it,” I said.
I called Ramona when I got home. Still no answer.
******
The Kid came for dinner with a bag of burritos from Casa de Benevides under his arm. We washed them down—Tecate for him, tequila for me—watched TV for a while, and went to bed early. When I woke up in the morning he’d already left for work. I was getting used to seeing his clothes draped over the bedposts at the foot of the bed, but a new pile had gathered on the chair. That’s the way it is when you own a house, a man starts moving in. There was still plenty of mess in my house, but that was my mess. This wasn’t. I gathered up all the clothes as if I was headed for the laundry, but they weren’t all dirty and I didn’t feel like washing them even if they were. I took the pile into the empty room and opened the closet, empty except for the fire shelter. That was empty enough for me. The garage was not a viable alternative. The hall closet was stuffed full. I went back to my bedroom, opened my closet, hung up what went on hangers, and found a bureau drawer for the rest.
13
IN THE MORNING I talked to Sheila McGraw and set up the appointment with the Barkers for four the following afternoon. I called Nancy and Eric separately and asked them to meet me in my office together at three. They sat down in the chairs across from my desk. I got Eric his coffee with sugar and Nancy her water.
“You’ve given me different versions of the events at Thunder Mountain.” I began. “Eric, you told me you took a walk with the backpack. Nancy, you said you both took walks but that you had the pack. This is a criminal investigation. I need to know what really happened. I can’t represent both of you if you are divided.” If I could only represent one, which one could be a tough choice. But I didn’t really expect them to go their separate ways. They’d been married a long time. I figured they’d find a way to present a united front. Eric looked at his wife. Nancy looked back. “We both took walks,” she said.
“Together?”
“Separately,” Nancy said.
“Then why did you tell me that only you did?” I asked Eric.
He watched the sugar dissolve in his coffee. “I forgot to mention it. It didn’t seem important.”
“I didn’t go anywhere,” Nancy said. “I just wandered around the trails.”
“With the pack on your back?”
“Yes. I thought I might want some water. The water was in the pack.”
Who was covering for whom? I wondered. Nancy had the rage to start a fire; Eric had the skill. If I’d been an investigative reporter I wouldn’t have dropped it there, I’d have badgered and hounded them. But I wasn’t a journalist, I was a lawyer. The fact that they had changed their stories didn’t necessarily mean they were guilty of anything. They might have been protecting each other from the appearance of guilt before. They might be telling the truth now. When it came to the Barkers, my job was not to believe or disbelieve. Aside from the question of defending someone who might have put my life in danger, my job was to give both of them the best possible representation. If I couldn’t accept those terms, I shouldn’t accept the job. In spite of all that had gone up in smoke I could smell government negligence. I wouldn’t want to think it was money that was driving me; I preferred to think it was the government’s carelessness, its stupidity, and its shabby treatment of Joni and the Duke City Hotshots.
“Unless Sheila McGraw finds an arsonist who’s willing to confess, this case could well go to trial. The Forest Service isn’t going to let one of their own get killed without trying somebody for the crime. Whatever you say to Sheila today you could be asked to repeat in court.”
“We understand,” said Nancy.
“All right,” said Eric, sipping at his sweetened coffee.
“You have nothing to add to what you’ve already told me?” Or subtract? I wondered.
“No,” said Nancy.
“Nothing,” said Eric.
“You’ll be questioned as witnesses but also as potential suspects; you were on the mountain, you had the means, you had the opportunity, you were angry and
upset. You don’t have to answer her questions if you choose not to.”
“We want to cooperate,” said Nancy. “We want the government to find out who did this.”
“Okay,” I said, “let’s get it over with.”
On the way to Sheila’s office I remembered I’d left the package with the photos and boots under my desk.
******
Sheila and Henry Ortega interviewed Nancy and Eric separately, as I’d suspected they would. Everyone played their roles to perfection, including me, but I had very little to do. Henry Ortega was the good cop—kind, gentle, concerned, not as well educated as Sheila, but people smart. He deferred to Sheila’s rank, but he retained his dignity. He played the part of the soulful saxophone. Sheila was a snare drum drilling the Barkers with questions. She was quick, aggressive, skeptical. Nancy and Eric were concerned and cooperative citizens who stuck to their story. They had taken walks separately. Nancy had the pack. They were both back at the cottonwood when Mike came down the mountain at three-fifteen, breathless and agitated. They had smelled smoke, but didn’t know the forest was on fire until Mike told them. They hadn’t seen Ramona or anyone else on the mountain. Nancy might have heard a vehicle, but she didn’t see one. They drove out with Mike in the Subaru and called the Forest Service. The only difference worth noting between them was that Eric wore a watch and Nancy didn’t, but I might have been the only one who noticed that.
At the end of the interviews Henry Ortega asked both Barkers how they were coping with Joni’s death. “As best we can,” said Eric. “I keep busy,” Nancy said. Did either of them know Tom Hogue? Eric had met Hogue before the trip to Thunder Mountain. Nancy hadn’t. What did Eric think of him? “He did his job,” Eric answered. “You must be very glad that your lawyer survived the fire,” Henry said. “Oh, we are,” they replied. Henry thanked the Barkers and the interviews were over.
Eric was last, and after his interrogation we were expecting Nancy to be waiting for us on a bench in the hallway, the same place Eric had waited for her. She wasn’t there. Eric went looking for her while I went to the bathroom. When I came out Eric was gone, too. I figured they’d be waiting outside in the sunshine.
Sheila was standing in the doorway to the interrogation room when I came back down the hallway. “Neil, could you come in here for a minute. I want to talk to you,” she said in a voice that reminded me of a principal about to scold me for smoking during recess. “That’s ‘a-l’ as in ‘pal,’ ” I remembered a grade-school principal saying, but even then I knew better than to believe it. The Forest Service hallway was dingy and institutional enough to remind me of the places where I went to school. Those hallways were where the tawdry high school dramas got played out.
“No, ma’am, I haven’t been smoking,” I felt like saying, “but your voice is making me crave a butt more than I have all week.” I unwrapped a Ricola and popped it to help satisfy the urge. The Barkers’ combined version of events was, I thought, as smooth and impervious as stone. Could Sheila possibly have known that very recently there’d been two different versions? I wondered. How smart was she anyway?
“Your clients were very cooperative,” she said.
“Of course,” I replied.
“You are aware that they provided each other with the window of opportunity, and the federal government doesn’t recognize spousal privilege?”
I sucked on my Ricola, smothered a cough, and said not a word.
But it wasn’t the Barkers Sheila wanted to talk about, it was Ramona Franklin, who had better means, motive, and opportunity than either of the Barkers and who hadn’t made herself available for interrogation. “I’m still looking for Ramona Franklin. Do you have any idea where she is?” Sheila’s eyes zeroed in on me through the glasses. You’re going too far with this school-marm business, I thought.
“I am not Ramona’s lawyer.”
“She did save your life. I thought you two might have been in touch.”
“We haven’t.”
“We tracked down her mother, who said Ramona brought her daughter to the mother’s house on the reservation and that Mike Marshall picked her up there early on Friday and took her to Thunder Mountain. She said Ramona called the trading post and left a message that she’d be back for the daughter in a few days. Mrs. Franklin assumed Ramona had called from Albuquerque.”
“As I said, I don’t know where she is.”
“If you do hear from Ramona tell her that it will be better for her if I don’t have to send out the posse.”
“I’ll do that,” I said. “How’s the on-site investigation going?”
“Pretty good. We’re just about to finish up.”
“When do you plan to reopen the area?”
“Sunday. Thanks for your help.”
“De nada,” I said.
When schoolgirls want to get out from under authority’s thumb they go outside and smoke a cigarette. There’s usually somebody there to hang out and be naughty with. Nowadays all smokers seem delinquent, and you can almost count on the cloud of smoke that hovers outside every office building, the butts littering the sidewalk, the smokers leaning up against the wall chatting and enjoying every puff. The sidewalk outside 517 Gold was too narrow and deep in shadow to accommodate the smokers. They were hanging out on the terrace outside the federal building across the street. I crossed over. These were my people. I wanted to join them and enter their cloud, but I began to gag on the smoke. I popped another herbal cough drop, well on my way to getting a Ricola jones.
Eric had found Nancy and they were standing at the sunny end of the patio talking intensely to one another as if they were the only two people in the world. Nancy extended her hand. Eric took it. Their linked arms made a long shadow in the afternoon sun. Eric saw me first and dropped Nancy’s hand.
“I’m glad that’s over with,” he said.
“Me, too,” I replied.
“How’d we do?” asked Nancy.
“You were perfect,” I said.
******
The Barkers drove back to the East Mountains. After work I went to the South Valley to see if I could find Ramona. The North Valley is making the transition from rural Hispanic to rich Anglo. Usually on the outskirts of a growing city only the rich can afford to be rural, but the South Valley hadn’t been making that transition yet.
Like Mirador, Sunset Court is a mix of cinder-block houses, mobile homes, and an occasional old adobe. I wondered if this was an Indian neighborhood, although in my experience Albuquerque doesn’t have Indian neighborhoods. We have white neighborhoods and brown neighborhoods, but none that I know of that are specifically Indian. Sandia Pueblo is on the north side of the city and Isleta on the south. The people who live there and work in town are close enough to go home at night. Other Native Americans seem to be scattered around town like the rest of us nonnatives.
It was early evening, the sun was casting a long shadow, and Sunset’s residents were coming home from work. I dodged a couple of kids peddling their bikes in a demon frenzy, their elbows and knees poking into the street. I saw an old woman walking her dog. She shuffled along in her little-old-lady shoes, but her dog, a rust-colored, thick-maned Chow, had the dainty step and erect bearing of a king. The homes were close together on Sunset, but houses are close together in the Heights, too, and those homes are four thousand square feet. If I had the money myself I’d put it into distance. Many of the places on Sunset had five or six vehicles parked in the driveway and the yard. None of the vehicles were new and most of them were junkers.
Ramona’s home, a trailer near the end of the block, had a tiny yard with a chain-link fence surrounding it. There weren’t any cars or trucks parked in the street or the yard, which had been scraped bare except for one carefully tended rosebush. The Valley is the rare place in Albuquerque where it takes an effort to keep the vegetation away. If you don’t pay attention here, your yard will fill up with sumac, Chinese elm shoots, and Russian thistle that grows round and fat until winter, when it
blows loose from its moorings and turns into footloose tumbleweed. I’d hate to think I’m one of those people who tries to re-create childhood wherever she goes, but I do feel an attraction to the big trees and thick weeds that grow along the Valley’s irrigation ditches. Maybe Ramona’s bare yard reminded her of the Rez. Maybe she’d made an effort to re-create the space.
The curtains in the trailer’s windows were shut tight. A child’s car seat and pink stuffed animal lay under the steps that led to the door. “No one home,” the place whispered, but I parked my car, went to the door, and knocked anyway. There was no answer. Henry Ortega’s card protruded from a crack beside the door. I placed one of my own cards next to Henry’s. On it I’d written “Thank you, Ramona. We need to talk. Call me.” As I turned to walk down the steps the man next door, who’d been watering his patch of green with a garden hose, noticed me. His belly hung out from beneath his undershirt and slopped over his belt buckle. His lawn was surrounded by a white metal fence full of curls and loops. In the middle of the lawn sat a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This man was going to as much trouble to keep his place green as Ramona had taken to make hers empty.
“She’s not home,” he said.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“No.”
“Can you tell me how long she’s been gone?”
“Couple of days.”
He went back to his watering. I went home and called Mike Marshall.
14
“HOW’D THE INTERVIEW with the Barkers go?” Mike asked me.
“Okay.” Maybe even better than okay. “When is your interview scheduled?”
“Tomorrow.”
“I stopped at Ramona’s place and found nobody there. Sheila McGraw’s still looking for her. She tracked down her mother on the reservation. Mrs. Franklin told Sheila that Ramona left her daughter there and that you picked Ramona up to take her to Thunder Mountain.”
Hotshots Page 9